“No. I mean, if she were some stranger, maybe? But she’s Mom. So of course not.”

“I get that, I think.” Lately, when I lie on my bed and watch the chandelier sparkle, I dip my toe in that quicksand and let myself understand why everyone is so angry at us, how we became the focus of so much seething resentment. I try to let go and see this from the outside. How Shola might look at our case, or even some rando in Nebraska. I think it boils down to this: I already have too much I did nothing to earn, and then I went ahead and stole from someone who was running all the bases.

“I’m scared, though. I’m scared she’s blowing her shot of this not ruining the rest of her life and ours. If she has to go away for, like, a year but that’s it, she could do that. She could. We could handle that too,” Isla says. Neither of us even bothers grappling with my mother’s hypothetical innocence. We know she did it. Of course she did.

Or more accurately, they did. The only reason we don’t have to contend with my dad’s guilt is because he’s likely to get away with it.

The question is, what’s the most palatable punishment? Our circumstances don’t allow us to tackle morality so much as practicality.

“But twenty? Or forty? That’s insane,” Isla says.

“I can’t imagine it. Mom in an orange jumpsuit. Mom, not here.”

“What she did, what we all did, was wrong,” she says, and I can see her swallowing back tears. Strong, impenetrable Isla. “We shouldn’t just get away with it.”

“You didn’t do anything,” I say.

“I keep thinking about what it means to know something. Like whether the concept of knowing is something active or passive. When does something graduate from being a suspicion?” Isla brings her arms around her knees, turns herself into a girl ball. Leave it to my sister to boil down everything I’ve been thinking into a simple question. Even now, I haven’t quite come out the other side. Kenny could lay out an argument on paper and prove to a court that there’s little evidence I was in on my parents’ plan. And yet, that’s nowhere near as reassuring as it should be.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too. Though probably in a less smartypants way.”

“I knew, I think. I mean, I didn’t know-know. I couldn’t explain it all like they do in the complaint. But I knew enough,” Isla says, looking straight at me, deliberately holding eye contact.

“You didn’t know. You couldn’t have,” I say.